Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity

Author(s): Peg Birmingham

Source: Arendt Studies , 2018, Vol. 2 (2018), pp. 25-36
Published by: Philosophy Documentation Center

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48511478

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Arendt Studies Volume 2, 2018 pp. 25–35
doi: 10.5840/arendtstudies201827

Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity:

Arendt’s The Human Condition

Peg Birmingham
DePaul University

W ritten in the years following the publication of the Origins of Total-

itarianism, Arendt’s The Human Condition is overwhelmingly read
as celebration of the event of natality and the human capacity for new begin-
nings after the near total totalitarian destruction of the political. Certainly,
the conclusion of Origins with its reference to Augustine and the promise of
beginning supports the view that Arendt’s next major book will be an exam-
ination and celebration of this promise. Taking the conclusion of Origins as
its starting point for reading The Human Condition, most commentary focuses
on what seems to be the central chapter of the book, namely, the chapter
on action wherein Arendt gives an account of the conditions of the new
beginning: plurality and uniqueness, power and freedom, forgiveness and
promise-making.
In my view, this reading of Arendt’s trajectory misses entirely the central
and continuous concern of both The Human Condition and the Origins, namely,
the modern production of superfluity. Prior to the reference to Augustine,
Arendt’s concludes her analysis of totalitarianism claiming, “We may say
that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men
have become equally superfluousness. . . . The danger of the corpse facto-
ries and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness
everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered
superfluous if we think continue to think the world in utilitarian terms.”
She goes on to note, “Factories of annihilation . . . demonstrate the swiftest
solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and
socially rootless human masses and are as much of an attraction as warn-
ing.”1 Arendt’s warning reminds us that while it might be comforting to

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: HBJ, 1951), 459.

1

© Arendt Studies. ISSN 2474-2406 (online) ISSN 2574-2329 (print)

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Peg Birmingham

think she is describing the systematic production of superfluousness of the

death camps, she allows for no such comfort. Her account in Origins of the
production of superfluousness claims that the radical evil of the camps was
the final step of a genealogy that begins with the violent expropriation of the
peasantry at the beginning of the modern age and picks up increasing speed
and force with the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, whose desire
for unlimited acquisition and accumulation moves imperialist politics from
the nation state to the global stage, producing thousands of politically and
economically superfluous human beings, with the economically superflu-
ous making common cause through the ideology of racism with the very
capitalist forces that produced them. The warning serves too as a reminder
that for Arendt the production of superfluousness continues unabated. She
argues that totalitarianism and its extreme evil of producing superfluity was
not defeated at the end of the second world war and will continue to be the
central problem of post-war Europe.
Seven years later, in The Human Condition, Arendt continues her reflec-
tion on this production of superfluity, arguing that in the post-war world,
this production has only increased with “greater expropriations, greater pro-
ductivity, and more appropriations” (HC 255). Rather than celebrating the
promise of new beginnings, I submit that The Human Condition is a report
on how the central, unifying concern of the vita activa, namely, worldly im-
mortality, has been all but destroyed as its three activities are caught in the
production of superfluity that reduces labor to bare life, work to the produc-
tion of a consumable world, and action to the production of processes that
contain the capacity for annihilating both the world and the earth. If there
is a promise still at work in The Human Condition, it lies only in Arendt’s
analysis of what had been each activity’s concern with worldly and earthly
immortality. Arendt’s deeply pessimistic final chapter, “The Vita Activa and
the Modern World,” calls into question whether recovering the vita activa’s
concern for worldly immortality is still possible in an age marked by an
ever-increasing production of superfluity.
The Human Condition begins with the launching of Sputnik, the signif-
icance of which is carved on the tombstone of a Russian scientist twenty
years earlier, “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.”2 This
for Arendt is something new. As she puts it, “Nobody in the history of
mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies.” The
earthly condition of human life, she suggests, may become superfluous, rad-
ically changed in ways at present confined to science fiction. Moreover, in
an account that sets as its task to “think what we doing,” Arendt begins her
report by noting “It could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and

2
Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1.
Hereafter referred to in the body of the text only with page numbers.

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 Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity: Arendt’s The Human Condition

have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever
be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which
nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain,
which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were un-
able to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need
artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking” (3). Insofar as speak-
ing is for Arendt the central activity of political action, she is claiming that
contemporary technological advances threaten to render superfluous both
thinking and acting.
Arendt’s turn to the vita activa emerges from the Prologue’s concern with
the increasing threat of the superfluousness of earth and world, thinking
and acting. While her turn to the vita activa is often read as a return to the
Greeks, Arendt explicitly argues that the Greek understanding of the vita
activa is too narrow, limited strictly to the bios politikos and uncontaminated
by labor or work. Greek philosophy is narrower still, privileging the vita con-
templativa as the highest realm of freedom and relegating the vita activa to an
inferior status. Arendt rejects the Greek model, proposing instead a view of
the vita activa that grasps “the articulations and distinctions within the vita
activa itself,” without introducing a hierarchy among the various activities
and certainly without claiming a subordinate status to the contemplative
life. Still further, she argues against the Greek claim of a common concern
infusing both the contemplative and the active life. Instead, she states: “my
use of the vita activa presupposes that the concern underlying all its activities
is not the same as and is neither superior nor inferior to the central concern
of the vita contemplativa” (17).
What then is the central, unifying concern of the vita activa? Arendt gives
her answer in the section immediately following her critique of the Greek
model. The central, unifying concern of all three activities of the vita activa is
worldly immortality, which she defines as “endurance in time, deathless life
on the earth and in this world as it was given, according to the Greek under-
standing, to nature and to the Olympian Gods” (18). Unlike the immortality
of nature and the gods, worldly immortality is an achievement of the vita
activa. Going further, the achievement of immortality lies in the human con-
dition to “produce things—works and deeds and words—which would
deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness” (21).
Significantly, at the very outset of The Human Condition, Arendt radically
transforms the notion of immortality and glory. The gaining of immortality is
not achieved through the deeds of heroic individuals and, in fact, her under-
standing of immortality is not at all concerned with individual immortality.
Rather, she is interested in worldly immortality achieved in varying ways
through all three activities of the vita activa: labor, work, and action. Arendt’s
footnote to immortal “works and deeds and words” points out, signaling
her agreement, that for the pre-philosophical Greeks there is no distinction

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Peg Birmingham

between ‘works’ and ‘deeds,’ “call[ing] both erga if they are durable enough
to last and great enough to be remembered” (21n19). She claims that only
with the Sophists is a distinction made between poiein and prattein: between
making and doing. Furthermore, she points out that Homer does not know
the word pragmata, which for Plato comes to mean “’human affairs’ and “has
the connotations of trouble and futility” (21n19). Instead, works and deeds
produce an enduring and immortal world, thereby rescuing human activity
from futility.
In what follows, I will take up Arendt’s discussion of how each activity
of the vita activa contributed to the achievement of worldly immortality as
well as how that concern has been rendered superfluous in the modern age.
As Arendt claims in the concluding sentence of Chapter One: “not even the
rise of the secular in the modern age and the concomitant reversal of the tra-
ditional hierarchy between action and contemplation sufficed to save from
oblivion the striving for immortality which originally had been the spring
and center of the vita activa” (21). It is not too much to claim that the guiding
question of The Human Condition is, “What was worldly immortality?”

Labor: Immortality and the Superfluity of Bare Life

No aspect of Arendt’s thought is more misunderstood than her account of
labor in The Human Condition. Grasping Arendt’s positive account of labor as
contributing to the immortality of the world, requires reading her criticisms
of the laboring activity from the background of her critique in Origins of
capitalism’s “original crime” of expropriation and wealth accumulation that
deprived the laboring activity of its worldly aspect, reducing it to a biolog-
ical process of bare life. As Arendt puts it in the final chapter of The Human
Condition, “Expropriation, the deprivation for certain groups of their place
in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life, created both
the original accumulation of wealth and the possibility of transforming this
wealth into capital through labor” (254). Explicitly prohibited in the modern
world is labor’s concern with worldly immortality. She claims that the pro-
cess of wealth accumulation “can continue only provided that no worldly
durability and stability is permitted to interfere, only so long as all worldly
things, all end products of the production process are fed back into it at
an ever-increasing speed. In other words, the process of wealth accumula-
tion, as we know it, is stimulated by the life process and in turn stimulating
human life is possible only if the world and very worldliness of man are
sacrificed” (256).
Of the three activities comprising the vita activa, Arendt’s analysis of the
laboring activity is most viewed from the loss of its concern with worldly
immortality. Thus, when Arendt asks, “What were the experiences inherent
in the laboring activity that proved of such great importance to the modern

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 Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity: Arendt’s The Human Condition

age?” (105), she is asking of what labor’s worldly activity had been and how
that activity was radically transformed in the modern world. Here I can
only be schematic, focusing largely on Section 13, “Labor and Life,” wherein
Arendt points out that life is an inherently worldly phenomenon, designat-
ing the space between appearance and disappearance, between birth and
death. Life, she argues, is never a natural process: zoe is always already a bios,
a worldly form-of-life to use Agamben’s term. At the same time, as worldly
appearance and disappearance. life’s inherent growth and decay too are
more than simply natural occurrences, transcending “the unceasing, inde-
fatigable cycle in which the whole household of nature swings perpetually”
(97). Giving the examples of trees and dogs as also experiencing worldly
growth and decay, Arendt does not limit this transcendence to the human.
Thus, from the perspective of worldly appearance and disappearance, living
on the earth and inhabiting the world are inseparably connected, allowing
her in Life of the Mind to broaden her claim of plurality beyond the human,
extending it to the “law of the earth.” At the same time, life is fecund, fertile,
and generative, revealing a “surplus at the heart of the organism, the su-
perabundance of nature’s household” (106). Indeed, she claims that labor’s
“blessing or joy” is the “human way to experience the sheer bliss of being
alive which we share with all living creatures” (106).
Life’s appearance and disappearance, its growth and decay, and its
surplus and fecundity are the inherent experiences that allowed for the re-
duction of life and the laboring activity to a cyclical, biological process in
the modern age. While Marx rightly grasps life’s surplus fertility, Arendt
claims that he mistakenly reduces this surplus to a natural biological pro-
cess and “to a particular form of human power” (106) that can be exploited
by the owners of production. In an important footnote in Section 13, Arendt
critically points out that it was the reduction of the laboring activity to the
“ever-recurring cycle of biological life,” that reduces labor to “the cyclical
character in the expenditure and the production of labor power that deter-
mines the time unit of the workday” (98n33). Throughout her discussion
of labor and life, Arendt is reading the laboring activity against Marx for
whom labor is reduced to the physiological, identical with the “biological
process in man” and “the process of growth and decay in the world,” re-
ducing both to the cyclical and destructive movement of nature. For Marx,
she claims, “Laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed
by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its ‘toil and
trouble’ comes only with the death of the organism” (98). Faced with the
contradiction between labor’s seemingly destructive cycle and the modern
age’s “hitherto unheard-of process of growing wealth, growing property,
growing acquisition,” Arendt claims that Marx, and he was certainly not
alone among modern political theorists, had to find a way to account for the
steady growth of surplus value. Arendt claims he found it in a concept of

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Peg Birmingham

process, “the key term of the new age” (105). Reducing labor to a natural life
process, the concept of process introduces an infinite and unending process
into labor’s activity in which “money begets money” and “power begets
power” which she argues, “owes it plausibility to the underlying metaphor
of the natural fertility of life” (105).
Arendt concludes her reflections on labor and life by returning to what
had been labor’s distinctive concern with worldly immorality which, she
argues, lies in its “fight against growth and decay, threatening the durability
of the world and its fitness for human use” (100.) Rather than viewing labor
as part of a natural life process, “[It] has a much closer connection with the
world, which it defends against nature” (100–101). Arendt points out that
labor’s activity is preventing the decay of the world, “repair[ing] every day
anew the waste of yesterday . . . what makes the effort painful is not danger
but its relentless repetition” (101). As a worldly activity, labor is concerned
with an enduring world that outlasts the lifespan of mortal individuals.
Arendt is quite clear on this last point: labor is not solely concerned with
meeting “immediate bodily needs,” but at the same time is engaged in a
“constant fight” to preserve the world in the face of its daily decay. Speaking
of this laboring task, Arendt states, “Its [labor’s] constant, unending fight [is]
against the processes of growth and decay, through which nature forever
invades the human artifice, threatening the durability of the world and its
fitness for human use” (100). Those who engage in this worldly laboring
task are the true heroes. Bearing little resemblance to the Herculean indi-
vidual “labors” that once “done are done once and for all,” Arendt suggests
that “the endurance it [labor] needs to repair every day anew the waste of
yesterday” is heroic in staving off the “relentless repetition” of decay and
in doing so contributes to the immortality of the world. Again, labor’s im-
mortal glory is not aligned with individual, timeless deeds, but instead is
an everyday activity that saves the world from the ruination of daily decay.

Work: Immortality and the Superfluity of a Utilitarian World

At the outset of her chapter on work, Arendt claims that no activity in the
vtia activa is more central to providing “the human artifice the stability and
solidity without which it could not be relied upon to house the unstable and
mortal creature which is man” (136). Contrary to her readers who argue that
Arendt’s primary concern is with political action and the capacity for new
beginnings, Arendt views the activity of work as the necessary condition for
the public space of action and thereby the most central of the three activities
comprising the vita activa. Without the work of ensuring the endurance and
immortality of the world, the space of political action is impossible. Arendt’s
infamous table is essential in separating and gathering the plurality of actors.
Without the table, that is, without a common world and artefacts, a plurality

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 Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity: Arendt’s The Human Condition

of actors would become either isolated and separate beings or collapse into
members of a large family in which there is one perspective. The end of the
concern for an immortal world marks the end too of political action.
As with her analysis of the activity of labor, Arendt is primarily con-
cerned with the loss of work’s concern with an immortal world, which she
attributes to the rise of modern capitalism wherein work becomes instru-
mental. The activity of work is now concerned with the production of use
objects whose value is utilitarian and determined by market exchange. In
fact, for Arendt, only when work is understood from a utilitarian standard is
a distinction introduced between poiesis and praxis, that is, between meaning
and use. Meaning, “for the sake of,” is no longer an end in itself, but in-
stead, established only through its use-value. Similar to the activity of labor
in the modern age, work becomes part of an unending process in which the
end not only justifies the means but becomes part of the infinite process of
means. Rather than a concern with durability, work becomes bound up with
a process of destruction in which the violence of the means is justified by its
end. The only way out of this violence and destruction is for the utilitarian
to “turn away from the objective world of use things and fall back upon the
subjectivity of use itself” (155).
For Arendt this turn is toward a “strictly anthropocentric world, wherein
the users, man himself, become the ultimate end which puts a stop to the
unending chain of ends and means” (155). Human beings become the “mea-
sure of all things” and the public realm is reduced to the “exchange market,
where he can show the products of his hand and receive the esteem which
is due him” (160). Capitalism, she argues, depends upon a homo faber who
“appears as a merchant and trader and establishes the exchange market in
this capacity.” In this schema, durability means nothing more than storing
up wealth for future exchange. Thus, in the modern age work’s concern with
immortality becomes superfluous as it undertakes the “entire instrumental-
ization of the world.” Everything becomes a use object, such that even “the
wind will no longer be understood in its own right as a natural force but will
be considered exclusively in accordance with human needs for warmth or
refreshment” (158). The tree as something once given as part of life’s surplus
and fecundity has been reduced to its potentiality as wood.
Significantly. Arendt reads Kant’s moral philosophy as “the greatest ex-
pression of anthropocentric utilitarianism” insofar as for him only the human
being has dignity. For her, Kant’s moral philosophy “degrades the world and
it degrades things in the world, turning both into mere means, robbing both
of their independent dignity” (156). More worrisome still is that a world
fabricated for the purpose of instrumentality “becomes as worthless as the
employed material, a mere means for further ends, if the standards which
governed its coming into being are permitted to rule it after its establish-
ment” (156). Arendt does not see anything that would suggest otherwise.

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Peg Birmingham

In the final section of the chapter on work, Arendt returns to work’s orig-
inal concern with the immortality of the world, focusing on the permanence
of the work of art. Ignoring the vast exchange market for works of art, which
she does not deny, Arendt focuses on the artwork’s “intense worldliness” in-
sofar as it gives “a sense or premonition of immortality” (167). Here Arendt
points to another sense of immortality as shining glory, thinking works of art
as exemplary in establishing a tangible present, “to shine and to be seen, to
sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read” (168). In other words, every­
thing that appears has a shape or form. The shape of things, she argues,
transcends their usefulness, introducing another standard by which they
are judged: “The standard by which a thing’s excellence is judged is never
mere usefulness as though an ugly table will fulfil the same function as a
handsome one, but its adequacy or inadequacy to what it should look like”
(173). Still further, the measure is not determined by the subjective needs of
human beings, but “by the objective standards of the world where they will
find their place, to last, to be seen, and to be used” (173). In other words, the
measure is whether the work contributes to a world fit for habitation. This is
the task of artists, poets, historians, architects, and writers who understand
that “In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men
during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action
and speech” (173). And this extends beyond immortal words and deeds to
“tangible things” fabricated for worldly appearance. Here again, Arendt is
not limiting immortality and glory to heroic deeds. Tangible works of all
kinds, from cups to tables, from works of arts to other cultural artefacts,
from reclaimed histories of forgotten deeds to public monuments contribute
to worldly immortality. Significantly, work’s concern with immortality is not
primarily that of recalling immortal speech and action, but instead, is that of
building an enduring world of artefact and artifice fit for habitation, which
is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for political action.

Action: Immortality and the Superfluity of a

Process Character of Action
Far from a celebration, Arendt’s discussion of action in The Human Con-
dition is an account of the ways in which action with its capacity for new
beginnings that saves the world from ruination finds a new, universal stand-
point unmoored from both the world and the earth and thereby loses its
world-saving capacities. Here we need to recall that Arendt’s turn to the
ontological event of natality in which action find its “ground,” is not out
of concern for the unique newcomer as such. As Arendt puts it at the con-
clusion of her chapter on action in The Human Condition, “The miracle that
saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is
ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically

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 Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity: Arendt’s The Human Condition

rooted” (247, emphasis mine). Important here is her emphasis on the miracle
of beginning that saves the world. As with her discussion of what had been la-
bor and work’s respective concerns with immortality, so too action’s concern
was not with heroic, individual immortality and glory, but instead, with the
immortality of the world.
Arendt claims that in the modern age action’s world-saving capac-
ity has been transformed such that it has become “the most dangerous of
all human abilities and possibilities, and it is also beyond doubt that the
self-created risks mankind faces today have never been faced before.”3 For
Arendt, action’s unprecedented risks and self-created dangers emerge in
an age wherein scientists and technicians have become the principle actors,
whereby action is more concerned with “acting into nature, creating natu-
ral processes and directing them into the human artifice and the realm of
human affairs, than by building and preserving the human artifice as a rel-
atively permanent entity.”4
Key to Arendt’s discussion of action’s dangerous transformation as ac-
tors move from a worldly and earthly space to becoming “dwellers of the
universe” is her distinction between a natural and a universal science. The
first, she argues, continues to view nature from the standpoint of the earth,
while the second finds an Archimedean point “beyond the earth “from
which to unhinge the world” (262). Going further and reflecting on the mak-
ing and using of nuclear weapons, a “universal” science imparts processes
into nature that are no longer part of nature and thereby produces processes
that do not occur naturally on the earth and “play no role in stable matter
but are decisive for the coming into being of matter.” Action’s capacity for
new beginnings now takes the form of creation in which a universal science
produces new elements never found in nature and directs them upon the
earth. All of this is made possible through an Archimedean standpoint lo-
cated outside the earth. The epigraph from Kafka to Arendt’s final chapter
titled “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” provides a cautionary tone:
“He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems
that he was permitted to find it only under this condition” (248).
Going further, this new form of action not only unchains automatic pro-
cesses, it understands itself as part of these processes. Arendt argues that
modern science, similar to the modern concept of history as well as the pro-
cess character of both labor and work, understands action as embedded in
an infinite process. As she puts it, “For the mentality of modern man, as it

3
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 63.
4
Ibid., 59. See my article, “Superfluity and Precarity: Reading Arendt Against
Butler,” Philosophy Today, 62.4 (2018). In this essay I briefly take up the universal
standpoint and the process character of action in the context of reading Arendt’s
notion of superfluity against Butler’s notion of precarity.

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Peg Birmingham

was determined by the development of modern science and the concomitant

unfolding of modern philosophy, it was at least as decisive that man began
to consider himself part and parcel of the two superhuman, all-encompass-
ing processes of nature and history, both of which seemed doomed to an
infinite progress without ever reaching any inherent telos or approaching
any preordained idea” (307). Still further, under the condition of remoteness
and distance that marks the Archimedean standpoint of universal science,
Arendt argues, “it at once becomes manifest that all our activities, watched
from a sufficiently removed vantage point in universe, would appear not as
activities of any kind but as processes” (322–323). Singular events and the
webs of relationships into which they are immersed become mere multi-
tudes with predictable patterns and configurations. As she puts it, “Under
this condition of remoteness, every assemblage of things is transformed
into a mere multitude, and every multitude, no matter how disordered,
incoherent, and confused, will fall into certain patterns and configurations
possessing the same validity and no more significance than the mathemat-
ical curve, which as Leibniz once remarked can always be found between
points thrown at random on a piece of paper” (267). In view of these ran-
dom points that fall into predictable patterns, action’s capacity for new and
unpredictable beginnings, as well as the human capacity for judgment, are
rendered superfluous in a universe where events have been transformed
into calculable patterns of quantifiable data.
At the same time, Arendt notes that we cannot think from the universal
standpoint As noted at the outset of this essay, in a book that sets as its task
“to think about what we doing,” Arendt is skeptical about whether this is
any longer possible. As she puts it, we can do things from the universal
standpoint but cannot think from that standpoint. She points out that the
human condition now faces a new dichotomy: “not between earth and sky,
but between human beings and the universal or between the capacities of
the human mind for understanding and the universal laws which man can
discover and handle without true comprehension” (270). Still further, the
“language” of mathematics (and here we can expand this to include algo-
rithmic data) empties out language insofar as it cannot be translated back
into speech. Speech, the condition of political life for Arendt, becomes super-
fluous. Indeed, also noted at the outset of this essay, Arendt goes so far as to
suggest that action’s embodiment will be rendered superfluous as machines
increasingly take over thinking and acting.
In the concluding chapter of The Human Condition, Arendt argues that
the human capacities for labor, work and action have given way to a no-
tion of action as process wherein the concern with worldly immortality is
reduced solely to species immortality, an immortality of biological metab-
olisms that for the most part go on without us. Here Arendt’s anticipates
Foucault’s notion of biopower by nearly two decades. The world and the

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 Worldly Immortality in an Age of Superfluity: Arendt’s The Human Condition

earth have become unhinged through the universal standpoint. The nature
of the real has been transformed into quantifiable networks of data seem-
ingly beyond the capacity of thinking and judging.
Arendt begins The Human Condition by asking what for her is the key
political question facing us today. Speaking of the modern age’s rebel-
lion against preserving the worldly and earth conditions given to human
existence in exchange for what human beings have made themselves, an ex-
change that will eventually “destroy all organic life on earth,” Arendt asks,
“whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this
direction” (3). Arendt concludes The Human Condition claiming that we live
in an age of an ever-increasing production of superfluity that has all but
destroyed the vita activa and its central concern with worldly immortality,
thereby suggesting that she is not at all not optimistic this question will be
answered affirmatively.

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 This content downloaded from
193.204.157.81 on Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:05:54 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms